1 - The Hidden City: James Kay, Friedrich Engels and Mary Barton’s Cellars

Summary

This chapter focuses on the structural role played by invisible architecture in Manchester, the ‘shock-city’ of the 1830s and 40s, in the writing of James Kay (1804–77; Kay-Shuttleworth from 1842), Friedrich Engels (1820–95) and Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65). In different ways, these writers each position hidden, underground and unconscious spaces, in particular the cellar-dwelling, as both structurally necessary and disruptive to the industrial capitalist system which generates such spaces. This arrangement is the result of a spatial and social repression that seeks to preserve the existing form of capitalist relations of production, but in doing so throws up spaces whose invisibility to dominant forms of power provides an opportunity for emergent or residual forms of thought and praxis to subsist within the city, albeit in tenuous and marginal ways. As I will show, such invisibility is a risk. It provides limited opportunities for selfdefinition to some working-class characters in Mary Barton (1848), such as Alice Wilson, but leads to absolute degradation for others, such as the Davenport family.

I approach visibility and invisibility in these texts as two sides of what Henri Lefebvre calls the ‘double illusion’ by which space conceals its socially produced nature. This double illusion consists of ‘the illusion of transparency’ on one hand and ‘the illusion of opacity, or “realistic” illusion’ on the other. In the illusion of transparency, visibility is foremost and space appears to be an open realm of free activity, in the same way as free-market capitalism appears to allow individual freedom. In the realistic illusion, invisibility takes precedence, so that objects encountered in space function as material blocks of ideology, appearing to have a ‘natural’ reality that conceals their origins. In this second illusion, contingent structures are given a cloak of permanence, obviousness and self-sufficiency. In Mary Barton, we might think of the attitude taken towards a desperately hungry Jem Wilson by the Carson family's servants, who ‘would have willingly given him meat and bread in abundance; but they were like the rest of us, and not feeling hunger themselves, forgot it was possible another might’.